Data Archiving in an Information Age
In today’s world, astronomic amounts of data can be found everywhere. Between the birth of the world and 2003, there was only 5 Exabytes of information created; now we create 5 Exabytes of data every two days. For the majority of the companies, on the one hand, they are facing the challenge of dealing with vast oceans of newly-generated data on a daily basis; on the other hand, they have the responsibilities of managing these data with appropriate methods to deal with compliance requirements and litigation readiness in a cost-effective and efficient way.
Backup vs. Archive
When facing these challenges, companies quickly realized backing up their data is the first step towards data management. However, many companies stopped there, they were either not aware of the option of data archiving or often confused between backup and archive. In fact, backup and archive solve different IT problems. Backup- as its name indicates- makes copies of your data and provides the ability to recover all or critical parts of IT operations and data in the event of unexpected deletion, corruption or unnatural disruption. Archiving on the other hand, provides a primary function to systematically categorize data for long-term retention. With the advancement of technology, the available archiving solution is so sophisticated that security and discovery capabilities are often included. However, the ultimate goal of archiving still remains to organize the data in a systematic fashion so they can be accessed and retrieved when requested to quickly respond to legal investigation and lawsuits. That as a result reduces the overall storage costs and improves business efficiency.
How Archiving Works
Archiving software archives data by their value and lifespan and properly moves them to much less expensive second or third storage tier. Once companies have made their governance policy, archiving software can archive active and inactive data from messaging systems (Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino), collaboration systems (Microsoft SharePoint) and File Systems. The data can then be automatically indexed by the lifespan and value of each data type. When requested by court, these data can be securely accessed, thoroughly discovered and even be disposed according to the company’s needs. Instead of outsourcing the work to third-party legal experts, companies have the option to complete the process in-house within hours. By using archiving software, it not only saves companies time and money but also reduces the risk of exposing company information.
EMC SourceOne Archiving Solution
EMC launched a data archive solution SourceOne (EMC Store) in 2009 as an upgrade to EMC’s then archiving solution EmailXtender. At a high level, EMC SourceOne is a product family providing archiving solution with a focus on meeting compliance and eDiscovery needs. SourceOne offers email archiving solution for IBM Lotus Notes Domino, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft SharePoint and multiple file servers. Customers have the option of adding Discovery Manager and Email Supervisor.
The migration process from EmailXtender to SourceOne is seamless. As we know, data such as a patient’s medical record or a customer’s financial record could be stored for years, while storage and archiving technology can change very fast. Take the storage medium for example, in only a few years, the primary storage medium has changed from tape to disk to sophisticated flash storage, the same could be true for archiving software. Therefore, finding a reliable vendor which can provide consistent support and in case of storage platform and archiving software change, be able to seamlessly migrate data to a compatible storage platform or software without losing data. EMC SourceOne has proven successful in this capacity.
SourceOne allows Wentworth Douglass Hospital the ability to move the compliance searches of emails from the IT department to the compliance team. At the City of Surprise, EmailXtender has been the archiving solution since 2006. As the amount of their email data doubles, SourceOne was brought in to migrate the data from EmailXtender to create a faster, more responsive compliance archive. Healthcare Realty took a more holistic approach to their Data Protection challenges, by implementing SourceOne for email archiving along with several other EMC products. By eliminating tape as a protection medium, the EMC products portfolio allowed them to deal with a 70% annual data growth rate.
For more EMC archiving information, visit: EMC SourceOne Store.